Thermal Work
How did the thermal cockpit shield work on the A4?
It looks like it blocks out the whole cockpit, making the pilot fly with only instruments. Did this block out radiation I assume? Or was it the heat from the blast? Did the heat have any adverse effect on the aircraft?
The thermal shield when lowered looked like the roll-down part of a roll-top desk. The idea was to block the harmful effects of a nuclear blast. So, it completely blocked out the outside view from inside the cockpit. Theoretically, the plane would not suffer any harmful effects from a thermonuclear blast unless the plane was actually in the blast (in that case it would not matter very much anyway). I never knew anyone who pulled down the buggy top (among us drivers that was what it was called). The reason was that some poor pilot was flying over the Sierra Nevada Range out west and he decided to see what it would be like with the buggy top down while airborne. Murphy's law being what it is, the damn top would not retract. He tried everything he could think of, to no avail. Swallowing his pride, he called base to try for some help. Again, after the laughter subsided among his compatriots, he still could not get it to retract. He obviously was completely flying on instruments (it was pitch black dark without interior lights on). The final result was that the idea came to pass to blow the canopy and land without it. One last piece of info from the parachute riggers squashed that idea. The buggy top is not attached to the canopy, it is part of the interior structure of the cockpit and can not be blown. So, he was vectored to a desert part of Nevada and flew in circles until rescue choppers could get to the scene of a controlled ejection. He performed the ejection to perfection (the only part of this whole fiasco that turned out right) and made a nylon let-down.
Now you know why no pilot ever messed with the buggy-top after that. Even during my moments of pure boredom during tanker hops I never seriously considered messing with the buggy top. There were 3 items within easy reach of the pilot that were not messed with: (1) the face curtin, (2) the D-ring & (3) the buggy top.
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